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By Peter Minde
MOUNT VAN HOEVENBERG, Lake Placid — What do they put in the water at APU? After APU’s Hailey Swirbul and Novie McCabe stood on the women’s podium in the morning’s 10-kilometer interval-start classic race, Hunter Wonders led the men’s field in a close race in the afternoon. With a time of 25:28.8, he beat APU teammate Luke Jager by 1.4 seconds. APU claimed four out of six domestic podium spots on the day, and had another four athletes in the domestic top ten.
After a frustrating Canadian Olympic Trials last month, Olivier Léveillé, of Centre National d’Entraînement Pierre-Harvey, was third overall, just .6 of a second back of Jager. Zach Jayne, of the University of Utah, was the third American, fourth overall. Jayne was 0.4 seconds behind Léveillé, and 1.0 second back of Jager. Just 7.6 seconds separated the top six finishers today; Swirbul was the only athlete Sunday who won a race by otherworldly beatdown margins.
By the time the men’s race started, the temperature warmed to 13 degrees (10.6 C) and a light breeze made things interesting. The humidity increased, as light flurries fell throughout the day. On Friday, Mansfield Nordic Pro coach Perry Thomas had characterized the conditions as styrofoam. Cold but fast. Overnight, an inch-and-a-half of snow fell, freshening the track and slowing things down a bit. Persistent cold enabled the course, especially the sketchy downhill left turn before the B-Climb, to remain in good shape.
With record-breaking registrations, the Ho was a madhouse today. Around 680 athletes and 164 coaches showed up to try their hand here. Officials sent the 373 men’s starters out at 20-second intervals, instead of the 30-second intervals typical for a distance race. And athletes still started three-a-minute for over two hours straight, from 1 p.m. through 3:09 p.m.
Of the top athletes, Wonders went out first. At the 1.25km checkpoint, he was in seventh place. Through the next two checkpoints, he threw down serious splits to move into second, then plugged in the afterburners over the final 1.25km.
“It was a struggle,” Wonders said after the race. “It was a hard race, but it was a great day. I’m obviously very happy with the result. And I’m just happy to put it behind me now.”
How was ski speed out there? “It felt fast at times,” said Wonders, “but the doublepole also felt pretty slow across the flats. I really thought that was gonna feel better. [I was] keeping consistent everywhere, not trying to push the hills and not trying to doublepole like crazy. I think just consistency was the key of the day.”
Insofar as executing a race plan, Wonders said, “You know, I think it’s beneficial to get good splits while you’re out there. Just keep you in a good headspace. And then my next phase was to not blow up. And I kinda held on to that part. That’s not easy out here”
Second overall at the first time check, Wonders’s teammate Zanden McMullen struggled a bit through the next 1.5km before settling down for a strong finish. McMullen was ultimately sixth on the day, less than a second back of John Steel Hagenbuch (Dartmouth/Sun Valley) in fifth.
Starting over three minutes after Wonders, Jager skied a steady race for second. “It was really hard,” Jager said. “You know, honest, hard course, great conditions, ride and glide. Yeah, good old-fashioned cross-country skiing.”
On his race plan: “I tried to break the course into sections and just have like a good thing to think about in every section. For when I was like, ‘Okay, this is when it’s going to get really hard,’ try and be ready for it when it came. So I was happy to feel like I had a good plan, and stuck to it as best as I could.”
Jayne went out the earliest of the top three Americans and went hard. He led at every time check until the last one, fading just a bit over the close of his second lap.
“I’ve never really had a good distance race here,” Jayne said following the race. “I had a really good personal best sprint race here at Spring Series last year.” (Jayne was seventh in the men’s skate sprint here on 28 March.)
“Leading into this distance race, I know I have a lot of great training under my belt, and I made a lot of improvements over the last year,” Jayne said. “So, I really just wanted to not only come out here and do my best, but ski relaxed and technically strong.”
Someone mentioned that nobody believed in Jayne; could he speak to that? “I think I’ve flown under the radar for the last few years,” mused the Utah skier, “not really being the best skier out of high school and slowly developing over the last few years. But I truly believe nobody has improved more than I have in the last two years and it’s not going to stop.”
Léveillé, third overall, came off a difficult time at the recent Canadian Olympic Trials at Sovereign Lake. On his race today, Léveillé said, “[It was] pretty good. I just came back from a little rest week at Christmas time and it was good to spend some time at home. I felt good today, I love the course, love the conditions.”
Did he have a plan for how he wanted to ski today?
“Just have fun and ski my best, just enjoy cross-country skating. It’s been a hard last month, so just enjoying races was my goal.”
Léveillé had some difficulty at Canada’s recent Olympic Trials. “I got robbed in the skate race because we didn’t have wax protocol over there and it was really hard,” he said. “The wax conditions were around zero degrees [Centigrade] and unfortunately my teammates and I didn’t have competitive skis.”
And speaking of waxing
The day before the 10km, I wanted to scope out the scene before skiing. With over 90 teams, the paddock was a madhouse on Friday. Despite many teams bringing their own trailers, van Ho ran out of wax cabins and rented a large party tent to accommodate everyone.
Michigan Tech had a truck, and athletes were working skis on a couple of wax benches.
Hailee Zimpel, a Michigan Tech U23, skied here at Junior Nationals a while back. This was her advice for her teammates who hadn’t seen the Ho before: “I think it’s really important that you can stay relaxed on the uphill, especially the big climb for the first lap, just because it’s so much climbing. But if you can ski over the top of the hills and just stay confident on the downhills, I feel like that’s best.”
Multiple ski companies and ski service outfits are here. One ski company rep declined to speak with Nordic Insights as he was required to secure permission from co-workers further up the food chain before talking to media.
But I barged into Out There Nordic’s cabin for a chat. Although proprietor Bjørn Hanson has provided neutral ski service for 13 years at a variety of races, everything from the Birkie to U.S. Nationals, I hadn’t run across them before.
“I got here today at 6:30 just because I’m somebody who likes to wake up early,” Hanson said. “And I got here this morning, started taking snow and weather readings and that kind of stuff, and then came back and was just working on a few things here before the rest of the staff showed up to kind of have a plan of what direction we’d go based on what the weather was doing.”
What are his views on sharing information, often a touchy, if not tetchy, subject at any venue with multiple wax benches? “We are sharers to a fault,” was Hanson’s take on his philosophy. “If somebody comes and asks, we’ll tell them what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Oddly, I think sometimes, because of the ski industry’s tradition where people didn’t always tell the truth, sometimes you can tell the people the truth, and then they convince themselves it must not be.”
Your correspondent recalled a conversation with a high school ski coach who prided himself on faking out other coaches when it came to kick wax.
“Occasionally we’ll set something on the bench that’s just absurd, like a tube of toothpaste or something, just to see if somebody’s paying attention,” Hanson said. “But we’re usually pretty good about sharing information. This week, we’re also doing ski service or wax recommendations testing for Swix, and so, you know, that is information that is publicly shared.”
Zach Caldwell, one-half of the team behind Caldwell Sport, was a couple of doors down. [Disclosure: your correspondent is a Caldwell Sport customer.] Running a lean operation, Caldwell focused on brand support and sales. He has a couple athletes that he’s coaching who test skis for him.
[Read/listen more: Zach Caldwell Waxes Poetic on Ski Waxing (story and podcast episode; there are how-to videos and everything)]
In general, television only shows the skiers out on the course. One seldom sees the work in the wax trailer where skis are made. To Caldwell, I put one of my favorite questions: What should people know about this business that I haven’t asked?
Here’s Caldwell:
“I think part of it is, what’s the part of the story that doesn’t get told successfully by TV production or in the media all that much. People refer to the skis being good or bad, but it’s a very technical sport, and it’s very dependent on skis. The [ski speed] margins are small these days. You know, if we look back at the late 70s, early 80s, the margins between racers are very tight compared to late 70s, early 80s, when the U.S. really showed up as an international power.
“It’s funny, going back to look at some of those races, you can find all sorts of old races on YouTube, and I love watching them, because those are the people I grew up watching. And you can just see speed differences are so, so huge. But it might be a couple places, because in a 30km it was so spread out. Now, with mass starts, it’s just so tight.
“And at this race, we’ve got, what, 690 racers tomorrow in a 10km race, and it’s going to be fair racing, because it’s going to be very consistent conditions all day. It might break down a little, but I think it’s going to hold up. A few seconds is going to be a lot of places in a race like this. So the ski selection, the grinding, the waxing, the kick waxing, the glide waxing — all of it is a really big part of the sport, and that’s why you see so many teams here outfitted with trailers and hauling a lot of material.
“I was just delivering some stuff to Erik Flora, and we were talking about how when he first started bringing racers to the SuperTour, it was like, you know, two wax boxes, including their irons and everything. It was everything they needed. And now it’s a whole production, and it’s a bummer. In a lot of ways, it would be nice if the sport was simpler, but it’s really difficult to take something where there’s an available advantage in a sport that’s really tight and not pursue the advantage. I don’t see a way to do that.
“What I do see, though, is a way to draw attention to it. And I really wish that the production of the sport in terms of TV was more like say what they do in Formula One, where they actually talk about it [technology], instead of pretend it’s something that doesn’t exist. They talk about the back end.
“I would love for World Cup coverage to have permanent camera placements in all the wax trucks mandatory, you know, just show what they’re doing and do a pre-race show. It can be paid for online or something, but I’d love to be able to see it.”
Last, but perhaps most important, this circus runs on coffee. Maybe you’re thinking of coming up for the World Cup Finals in two-plus months. Where are the best places to fuel up? Caldwell likes Capisce, just outside Lake Placid. Hanson has a soft spot for Nori’s in Saranac Lake. Your correspondent agrees wholeheartedly with both, and will add Origin, which has shops in both Saranac Lake and Lake Placid.
Racing resumes Tuesday with the skate sprint. Don’t touch that dial!
Some brief video:
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